‘He used to drink here sometimes.’
‘Used to?’
‘He’s dead, ain’t he?’
‘How did you know?’
‘It’s all over the news for fuck’s sake.’
‘His missus tells us he was threatened in here one night a month or two back. You wouldn’t know anything about that?’
‘Is this for you or him?’ he asked, pointing in towards Hendry.
‘Me. He’s off duty,’ I said. ‘He’s only here for the drink.’
‘He’s a brave man coming here.’
‘So he told me.’
Patsy glanced at the picture again. ‘Martin Kielty. He was in here about six weeks ago, dealing from the bogs.’
‘Is that allowed here?’
‘Jesus, look around you, Ben. What do you think?’
‘So what happened?’
‘Three boyos came in. Gave him a kicking in the cubicle. Told him he’d be killed if he came in here again.’
‘Who were they?’
‘Jesus, Ben: I’ll be shot myself.’
I took fifty euros from my pocket and placed it on top of the cigarette machine. ‘For your ciggies.’
Patsy licked his lips quickly as he lifted the money, folding the note over on itself several times, as if in making it smaller, he was somehow diminishing the significance of what he was about to say.
‘Jimmy Irvine and his crew. They beat fuck out of him.’
‘Would you come into the station and make a statement about that?’
‘Would I fuck!’
‘His crew? Armstrong and Cunningham?’
Patsy nodded, peeling the cellophane off his cigarette packet.
‘Thanks, Patsy,’ I said, turning away.
‘I– I thought it was lousy,’ Patsy said. ‘Not on Kielty, like – he deserved it, selling his shit. But there were plenty of others selling too, but they only went for him.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You think people in there are pissed about your cop friend being here for
political
reasons? Half of them are dealers looking to do some trade. New times, Ben.’
‘I was just telling him that,’ I said. ‘Irvine didn’t touch any of the other dealers?’
Patsy shook his head. ‘I’m going out for a smoke,’ he said. ‘Have a safe journey home.’
I told Hendry what McCann had said when I went back to my seat. ‘They want us out of here,’ I said, drinking down half my glass of Coke and lifting my coat.
‘Did I hear that wee girl Williams’s kid died?’ Hendry asked, having seemingly not heard me.
I nodded. ‘Fell off a cliff out camping.’
‘Christ, that’s rough. Anything sinister?’
Typical cop, I thought. Focusing on the death, not the victim.
‘Nothing. Pathologist suggested he might have jumped. She couldn’t find any evidence that he tried to stop his fall.’
‘How’s Williams? I’m sure she must be in pieces.’
‘Not good. Her husband’s back on the scene too – he’s a first-class prick.’
‘Jealousy, Inspector?’ Hendry laughed.
‘Statement of fact. He treated her like shit.’
‘I always thought you two would – you know . . .’
I shook my head. ‘I’m a happily married man, Jim,’ I said.
‘She’s a lovely girl. Nice looking. I think she had a wee thing for you too, if I remember rightly.’
‘I’m a happily married man,’ I repeated.
‘Which is why you’re sitting in the pub with me, pretending to drink, instead of going home to your wife,’ he replied. ‘You’ll be getting me a bad reputation with the boys, sitting drinking Coke.’
‘I’m driving,’ I protested.
‘Jesus, so am I,’ he said, incredulously.
It was after eleven by the time I started back home. The rain continued to beat down against the car, the wind catching me sideways on the roundabout. I wondered how Caroline was holding up. In truth, I had missed her as my partner. I missed her friendship, the craic and support she gave. She was solid, in the same way that Debbie was solid.
I also missed having someone to talk to about the cases I was working on. A fresh pair of eyes might see something I was missing. The evidence suggested that either Irvine or Hamill had been responsible for the killing of Kielty. But I still had to find Hamill. I also wanted to find Lorcan Hutton to see what his connection was. And I couldn’t shake my suspicion that, in some way, Vinnie Morrison was involved in this, even though it was possible that he had gone straight, as he claimed. Whatever the case, I knew where Jimmy Irvine was going to be the following night and had enough to at least question him about the killing of Martin Kielty.
I was passing the filling station when my radio crackled into life. It was the desk sergeant in Letterkenny. He needed someone in Lifford. One of my own neighbours, who lived a few miles up the road, had phoned the station to say that a body had just washed into her back garden.
Margaret Hunter was still in a state of shock when I reached her home. The house backed against a steep, grass-covered incline down which floodwater could be heard rushing. She stood now in her kitchen, wearing her late husband’s wellington boots, which she had retained despite the fact that he had been dead almost six years. I noticed that she had placed rolled-up towels at the foot of her back door, in an attempt to stymie the floodwater. A discarded mop seeped onto the tiled floor beside the door.
‘I opened the door to mop out the water,’ she explained, handing me a torch. ‘I could see it from the back door; it was lying against the fence. Just lying there.’
‘You might have been mistaken in this weather, Margaret,’ I suggested. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing. Clothes blown off someone’s line, perhaps?’
She regarded me warily, as if insulted that I was suggesting she might have made a mistake.
‘It’s a body, Benedict,’ she stated.
She was right.
A wooden fence marked the rear boundary of her property. The body had come to rest against one of the fence posts, its tattered burial shroud lifted by the floodwater rushing past it. The deceased, however, looked to have been dead for many years. The skinless skull grimaced at me through a frame of tangled yellowed hair, the bones of the arm missing, save for the ulna which seemed caught in the sleeve of the gown. The grass on the incline above the body was flattened down showing the path the body had travelled along, and I guessed it had been washed down from the top of the slope behind Hunter’s house.
I shone the beam of the torch up the incline the water was running down. Further up the gradient, I believed I could discern the shape of a second corpse, though the beam of the torch was not powerful enough to allow me to see it clearly.
‘I told you it was a body,’ Margaret Hunter said, leaning out from her back door. ‘Didn’t I say that?’
‘You did indeed, Margaret,’ I agreed. I pointed up the incline with the torch beam. ‘What is that up at the top there?’
‘That’s the old Abbey,’ the old woman said, pronouncing the words slowly and clearly, tutting as she did so, that I should have asked such a question.
About a mile from our home, a laneway runs down from the road towards the river. At a fork in the path, a turning leads to the east through a field of cattle, along a tributary of the Finn. The western path at the fork, however, leads to the ruins of an ancient abbey that once housed the sanctuary of St Lugadius. All that remains of the old building is a single, crumbling wall. The area is rumoured to be one of the resting places of the treasures of the Knights Templar which, according to local rumour, was hidden at the spot where three rivers meet.
On either side of the Abbey lie two graveyards. The one nearest the gate is the more recent, most of its graves now cemented over, their inhabitants secure beneath the earth. The older graves, though, dating from the eighteenth century, are situated on the far side of the Abbey wall, in rocky ground at the top of a gradient that leads to Margaret Hunter’s back door. At the time of their creation, the ground must have been prohibitively rocky, for the graves here, owned by Lifford’s wealthiest families during the 1700s, are actually sarcophagi sitting above ground.
The graves had been sealed with heavy sandstone blocks, which over time have cracked and eroded, through environmental damage and the weight of young boys jumping from one tomb to the next. The stonework was already weakened by the time the storm hit.
Over the next few hours it became clear that the continual rain had flooded the ruins of the Abbey. The older graveyard, situated in the bowl of the grounds, filled with the rainwater and held it there, the solid rock of the ground beneath preventing the water from seeping away. The pressure eventually burst through the walls of one of the sarcophagi, washing the remains of the inhabitants out into the open. The flow of the wash drifted the bodies towards the lip of the bowl and then down the slope of the hillside, until they came to rest around the lands of Margaret Hunter.
It took me a few moments to walk the incline up to the Abbey. The muddy ground was sodden and slippery. I also had to keep to the outer edge of the incline to try to avoid treading on parts of any other bodies which might have come down from above.
When I reached the top, the low stone wall around the graveyard was on the point of collapse. A great pool of water had gathered behind it. Even in the torchlight, I could make out three more bodies, floating just below me. One was little more than bones held together by rags, the yellowed death shroud billowing out below it. I could see a copper-coloured skull grinning up at me from beneath a foot of water.
I waded across to the side of the broken sarcophagus, shining my torch in through the demolished wall. Beyond it, waist-high nettles fanned out in front of me and I could see the path the bodies had taken, the flattening of the nettle bed where the floodwater had washed. In the torchlight, I could make out the white patches of clothes amongst the nettle patch, where other bodies had come to rest.
I noticed, to my left, a second tomb which seemed to be crumbling under the strengthening rain which pattered off the leaves of the undergrowth. The idea of standing in an old graveyard in the dark while corpses floated around me caused me to shiver involuntarily, and the urgent whisper of running water caused me to bless myself and rub the goose pimples from my arm. Clearing up could wait until morning, when the weather might have improved and I’d be able to rouse assistance. Though I had little doubt that, by morning, more bodies would have been washed from their rest.
The storm raged through the early hours, the wind at times a thudding against the dormer windows of our bedroom, at others a harsh cry whistling along the valley. The rain seemed to fall in fits and starts, at once battering the glass of the skylights in our hall, then easing, as if gathering itself for a further assault.
If Debbie heard me coming to bed, she did not show it; instead she lay in silence, with her back turned towards me. Both Penny and Shane woke during the night, calling from their rooms for me to come in and get them. By 6 a.m. both were curled up in our bed, snuggled between myself and Debbie. I lay awake for a while, watching their sleeping forms. I regretted what had happened between Penny and myself the night before. I didn’t want her being too friendly with Morrison’s son. But I was also aware that I couldn’t dictate to her who her friends should be. Perhaps I had been unfair in not letting her go to the disco. In truth, I resented the fact that, before long, I would not be the only male with a claim to her heart. And it frightened me that, soon, she would know enough about men and their secret prides and vanities to judge me and find me wanting.
Finally I got up and went downstairs for breakfast. Frank, our one-eared basset hound, lay curled up in his bed. When he saw me, he attempted to get up, though his joints seemed to fail him, for he raised himself on his two front paws, then lowered himself back into his bed, whining softly. Within a minute he was sleeping again, the loose skin of his lips flapping slightly in the path of his warm breath. We had bought Frank when we believed we would not be able to have children. Then Debbie got pregnant with Penny. The two of them had grown up together. With a pang, I realized that, for Frank at least, who was now almost twelve, their journey together was nearing its end. I rubbed the velvet fur on the dome of his head, though noticed that it was tougher than I remembered, his coat aged now.
Standing at our back door, smoking my first cigarette of the day as the wind blew stray drops of rain against my face, I could not easily dismiss the sadness that had settled around my heart.
I arrived back at Margaret Hunter’s house after eight that morning. I contacted the local councillor and he had arranged for a number of council workers to help with the recovery of the corpses. I had also phoned our local priest, Father Brennan, who arrived in the waterproofs he usually wore when he went fishing.
I’d asked for help from Letterkenny, but there had been a number of accidents during the night, and there would be no free officers until lunchtime. I did manage to rouse Paul Black, though he had a shift in the hotel where he also worked part-time, starting at eleven. Finally, a local undertakers had offered assistance. With a crew from the local hospital, they were standing, sheltering against Margaret Hunter’s gable wall while the rain finally began to lessen in intensity until eventually it was no more than a haze. Still, it was enough to seep through the protective layers of clothes we were wearing, and gather in a mist around the base of the hillock we were standing on.